World News Quick Take

Agencies

ISRAEL

Machinegun destroyed

The government said its troops fired into Syria yesterday and destroyed a machinegun position in the Golan Heights from where shots had been fired at its soldiers in a further spillover of the Syrian civil war along a tense front. It was not immediately clear whether the government held Syrian troops or rebels responsible for what a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said had been a deliberate attack on military patrols in the occupied territory. Soldiers “destroyed a Syrian machine gun nest that fired twice in the last 24 hours on Israeli patrols operating to safeguard the border,” the spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said on his Twitter page. Shells have fallen several times inside Israeli-controlled territory during Syria’s civil war. Some of the incidents have drawn return fire.

UNITED STATES

Two die skydiving in Florida

Two skydivers from Iceland, one an instructor and the other a student, were killed in a skydiving jump on Saturday in Florida, media reported. The two men were part of a group of 22 skydivers who jumped from a plane in Zephyrhills, about 50km northeast of Tampa, according to the Tampa Tribune newspaper. When only 20 of those who jumped returned, authorities launched a search and found the bodies of the two men a few hours later, media reports said. The two men were from Iceland, according to Skydive City, which planned the jump, the Tribune reported. Their identities were not released.